[HN Gopher] My startup journey
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       My startup journey
        
       Author : mkx
       Score  : 120 points
       Date   : 2021-06-10 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (johnjianwang.medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (johnjianwang.medium.com)
        
       | ashwal wrote:
       | You captured the stochastic nature of building quite well -
       | thanks for sharing : )
        
       | haskellandchill wrote:
       | This stuff does make me uneasy, because it's what we all need,
       | enough of a support system to be able to fail, but so few of us
       | have it. When I failed I was homeless, and it still hurts. When I
       | sock away a hundred thousand maybe I can have a journey.
        
       | rishikeshs wrote:
       | Nice Article JOhn!
        
       | Igiplow wrote:
       | I love the way you wrote the article with all those lessons at
       | the beginning of every sub-chapter. Good luck further on.
        
       | erulabs wrote:
       | Hah what a similar story to my own - open source, Stripe then
       | into YC. The energy at Stripe was unreal and I'm not sure I fully
       | groked it until I started my own business.
       | 
       | > Everyone I talked to genuinely cared about their job and about
       | me as a person, and everyone was high powered.
       | 
       | Simply walking around the office(s) was incredibly energizing for
       | this reason. Fairly hard contrast with the last year of isolation
       | and working alone! "Figure out what great looks like" is great
       | advice, but I will say it does generate some imposter syndrome
       | that I hadn't felt before Stripe and YC, for (probably) better or
       | for worse. Capitalizing on these experiences without getting
       | caught up in comparison paralysis is a genuine skill that you
       | seem to have mastered. Congratulations on the funding!
        
       | itsmemattchung wrote:
       | > Just before launch date, we stayed up the entire night fixing
       | polish items. I remember going to sleep in a phone booth and
       | waking up early in the morning to try to finish out some last
       | edits while Michelle worked on the blog post
       | 
       | God damn, I'm old. That start up scene used to sound appealing to
       | me but now makes me cringe.
        
         | localcrisis wrote:
         | Not to mention the preceding paragraph:
         | 
         | > When I started at Stripe, I asked to delay my start date
         | until after a family vacation, but my manager just told me to
         | start sooner and take time off later (Stripe was just shy of
         | 100 employees and moving incredibly quickly). I now had an
         | artificial deadline of one month to ship my first project.
         | 
         | That's a reasonably sized red flag. Asking someone to miss a
         | family vacation so they can go after some arbitrary deadline?
         | 
         | Yikes.
        
           | wbc wrote:
           | Wait I read that as they start earlier, and take the time off
           | as planned, later. Only because the exact same thing happened
           | to me, maybe it's ambiguous?
        
           | phsource wrote:
           | For what it's worth, when I joined Stripe (a bit closer to
           | 400), I told my manager that I had a 2-week vacation after my
           | first week of work, and they were totally fine with it! I
           | suspect this is more of a "setting expectations early" and
           | the cost of making a change
        
       | jrochkind1 wrote:
       | > For the next 6 months, I spent my extra hours before class (and
       | during my least favorite classes) working on Rails bug reports...
       | The core team members held every pull request to a very high
       | standard, and I learned a lot about how to write good code.
       | 
       | My question is how he got anyone from rails core team to review
       | his PR's! Maybe things were different then.
        
         | johnjwang wrote:
         | Author here: I started by making really small patches at the
         | beginning and building up credibility with the team. For
         | example, one of my earliest commits was just to add better
         | verbiage on migrations (https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b
         | 4c99ea0a4d7e5223fa1b2...). Eventually the core team saw my name
         | enough that my pull requests could get more complex.
        
       | gwintrob wrote:
       | John! Thanks for sharing your story. Anyone who ate as many
       | Costco muffins as you, Doug, Max, Ted, and me during YC were
       | destined for great things :) Congrats on the fundraise!
        
         | johnjwang wrote:
         | Thanks Gordon, those were good times =)
        
       | maximp wrote:
       | Hey John! Always nice to see a familiar face on HN - thanks for
       | sharing the story!
        
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       (page generated 2021-06-10 23:01 UTC)